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The Income tax department has initiated e-Sahyog project to reduce compliance cost for small taxpayers, wherein tax mismatch notices would be sent via emails instead of physical letters and the taxpayer can respond to the notice by logging into the income tax e-filing portal.

Have you changed your phone number recently? Provided the email ID of your friends, relatives or the chartered accountant while filing returns? It is about time to get your own email address and phone numbers updated in the Income Tax Department records.

This is because the notices sent out to taxpayers for tax mismatch, usually due to erroneous calculations and returns, would not land at your doorstep anymore. Instead the assessing officers would now be sending mismatch notices via email and notifying the same through SMS, in line with the Digital India initiative of the Government of India.

The Income Tax Department on Tuesday launched an e-Sahyog project on a pilot basis to reduce the compliance cost. The objective of e-Sahyog is to provide an online mechanism to resolve mismatches in income-tax returns to taxpayers whose returns have not been selected for scrutiny, without visiting the Income Tax Office. Under this initiative the Department will provide an end to end e-service using SMS, e-mails to inform the taxpayers of the mismatch,” the Ministry of Finance stated on Tuesday.

After receiving the mismatch notice, small taxpayers – whose returns haven’t been selected for tax scrutiny – needn’t personally visit the income tax office. Instead, they would be provided an online mechanism to resolve mismatches in their income-tax returns.

The taxpayer can log-in to the e-filing portal www.incometaxefiling.gov.in, view the information about the mismatch and submit an online response on the portal itself.

“The responses submitted online by the taxpayers will be processed and if the response and other information are found satisfactory as, per automated closure rules, the issue will be closed,” the notification said.

Apart from helping you save a trip to the income tax department office, the e-sahyog initiative also helps you track the status of the mismatch issue by simply logging in to the e-filing portal.

Here are the steps you would have to follow if you receive a mismatch notice: